A typical NOC is a very network centric environment. The end-customers buy services that may span over multiple network domains and technologies. Thus the operations staff depends on external inventory systems and databases to understand the service relationships while troubleshooting customer issues. This approach requires manual overlay of the information from different systems to understand the problem impact and may take anywhere from several minutes to hours depending on the complexity of the problem.

Service Assurance eliminates these manual steps while troubleshooting customer problems. It enables the operations staff to see the customer impact of the issues in addition to the network view, all in real time.

SERVICE MANAGER

Service Manager enables operations staff to define bearer services and end customer services. It discovers the end points of the facilities and provides tools to map end points to individual services and circuits. The services can span multiple systems and network domains. The hierarchical relationships between services, service paths and their business priority can be defined within Service Manager. In addition to providing facilities to manually enter service information, the Service Manager offers utilities to import service information from multiple external inventory systems.

SERVICE CORRELATION

Service Correlation relates the network issues to services in real-time. The NOC staff can see the outages in real-time and resolve the problems based on business priority. The operations staff simply drills down from a customer view down to a network view to visualize service layouts and can immediately pinpoint the core problem affecting the customer. The Service Correlation retains history of incidents even after they are resolved. The operations executives can mine such data and run reports to track service outages and resolution process.

SERVICE VISUALIZATION

While trouble shooting issues, operations staff spends a significant amount of time understanding the cause of the problem. This requires detailed understanding of the services, network topology and interdependency of services. The Service Visualization consolidates the customer issue, service outage and network issues into a single place. With Service Visualization, even a novice technician can navigate a service dependency tree to understand the cause and effect of a given network event. Service Visualization presents GIS-based views and can be used to drill down several layers of network topology to troubleshoot service issues.

SERVICE ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

A typical NOC handles several thousands to millions of events per day. Less than 1% of such information is relevant and the remaining tends to be symptomatic issues. Several available solutions in market today offer rules-based RCA tools to identify the root-cause. This approach is expensive and error prone. It is also very time-consuming to implement and hard to maintain, as the rules have to be constantly updated.

The Adaptive Behavioral Alarm Suppression (ABAS) dramatically simplifies the task of building root-cause rules. As opposed to traditional RCA algorithms, ABAS models behavior of the technology. It does not require any instance information. Once the behavior is defined, the policy can be simply applied to various instances of such technology. ABAS enable the NOC staff to suppress symptomatic problems in real-time while simplifying the time it takes to create and maintain the root-cause policies.

BUSINESS ADVANTAGES

• Know all affected services in real-time
• Reduces time taken to troubleshoot service issues
• Reduces revenue loss related to SLA non compliance
• Enables visibility of problem resolution by customer